Geography blessed the future town of Hampton when English settlers began building on its waterfront in the mid 1600s. With Virginia's burgeoning tobacco trade and growth in the production of wheat, corn, timber and naval stores, the increasing movement of goods to and from England soon transformed its well-located wharves into a bustling center of commerce.

"Convenient is the key word," says Hampton History Museum curator J. Michael Cobb, describing the forces that combined to make the town prosper.

"Hampton was the entrance to Virginia. It was the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. It was the entrance to the James River. And for a period in the early 18th century, that prime location made it one of the leading ports in America."

Situated near the mouth of the bay and the outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, the coastal area that became Hampton had long functioned as Virginia's doorway. Virtually every settler passed by its shores and — like the first recorded Africans who landed at Old Point Comfort in 1619 — many of them stepped ashore here before moving into the interior.

By the late 1600s, that steadily growing traffic had spawned a small waterfront village with wharves and storehouses as well as numerous taverns. From there a road led inland to several well-developed plantations dotted with buildings and crisscrossed by ditches and fences.

Yet not until the ports and towns act of 1691 moved the customs house from Old Point Comfort did a trio of trustees carve out a street plan with half-acre lots and a central crossroads not far from the main landing.

"The King Street wharf was the natural focal point then — as it is now," Cobb says. "And the whole town grew up around it."

Within a few years, the line of docks, wharves and maritime merchants extended all along the waterfront — from King Street east to Customs House Point and then north past Mill Point. Shipfitters and shipyards sprouted up, too, not only producing vessels approaching 300 tons in size but also spawning a local neighborhood of sawyers, carpenters, blacksmiths and coopers.

At least 6 licensed taverns served the bustling new town, including the King's Arms Tavern on south King Street, which dated back to the 1680s and stood until redevelopers razed it in the 1970s.

"It was one of Hampton's finer establishments — and the leading tavern here for years," Cobb says. "But there were a lot of rough-and-tumble places, too."

By 1716, Hampton boasted 100 houses and was home to one of the colony's highest concentrations of wealth. So impressed was British Army officer John Fontaine by the number of merchant vessels and warships lying offshore that he described the town as "a place of the greatest trade in all Virginia."

Just two years later, Hampton launched the famed Royal Navy expedition that brought the head of Blackbeard the Pirate back after defeating him in North Carolina. Yet despite a building boom that included the completion of St. John's Episcopal Church in 1728, the town's fortunes soon began declining.

"The Hampton Bar was growing and filling in the channel. The ships were growing larger and deeper — and eventually they couldn't make it past the bar and up the Hampton River," Cobb says.

"So it wasn't long before Norfolk came along with some real power and money and overtook Hampton."

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